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You're right, there is a discrepancy and I didn't think to put it in the article.

I couldn't find the doctor's charges on-hand, but the total cost for the facilities/drugs/equipment was $48,851.82. The insurance ended up paying $14,742.88 of that post-adjustments.

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$14,742.88 is the real cost since hospital are running off of the income from what insurance actually pays. if average people were able to pay the "insurance adjusted price" for most things they would not need insurance for most things.

Somewhere within the regulatory frameworks in which health insurance and hospitals operate, there's got to be the leverage to make pricing and other metrics like infection rate, readmission rate, etc., transparent.

Otherwise you can hide some serious price gouging in that fog of bogus prices.

I'd rather just let any citizen/taxpayer pay the medicare or medicaid rate for a medical procedure out of pocket if he wishes. That's even lower than the insurance negotiated rate, and hospitals/doctors would have every right to exclude all medicare/medicaid patients if they want (many private doctors do, but generally hospitals don't, since they depend on the volume from medicare, and there are some other benefits for residencies).

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